In its second partial report for the new, sixth status report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) drew attention to the growing climate dangers over the next two decades.

3.3 to 3.6 billion people worldwide live in regions severely affected by climate change.

Another quarter of humanity must at least temporarily reckon with drastic changes due to global warming.

"Dangerous and far-reaching destruction of nature and the living environments of billions of people" are already being affected by man-made climate change, according to the IPCC.

Joachim Müller-Jung

Editor in the feuilleton, responsible for the "Nature and Science" department.

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Exceeding the maximum warming of 1.5 degrees targeted in the Paris climate agreement since the beginning of industrialization would multiply the damage in cities, agriculture and nature worldwide.

We are currently at a global temperature rise of almost 1.2 degrees.

With the report of the IPCC working group two, as in the first partial report six months ago, the 1.5-degree limit is marked as the decisive threshold for a climate change that can hardly be controlled in many places.

The report shows that countries are doing far less than is actually necessary when it comes to climate change adaptation.

Special focus on cities

Over the past three years, more than 200 scientists around the world have compiled all the data on the consequences, vulnerability and adaptation measures and evaluated them in a report spanning more than a thousand pages.

The thirty-five-page "summary for political decision-makers" presented this Monday states that increasing climate risks are imminent or will become noticeable in the next two decades if climate change is not quickly limited.

The gap between necessary and actual adaptation is already widening.

The report places a special focus on the cities of the world.

On the one hand, because almost half of all people live in cities and the effects and risks therefore affect a particularly large number of people there.

Even if the global temperature increase were only to temporarily exceed the 1.5 degree mark and then drop again, this would result in serious and sometimes irreversible damage to ecosystems and societies.

The report separates short-term climate change impacts up to 2040 from medium- and long-term impacts.

Above all, these short-term consequences of the currently greatly accelerated warming with much more drastic effects than long thought have been underestimated so far, as the IPC report makes clear.

Take agriculture as an example: "Every tenth of a degree of warming above 1.5 degrees will lead to escalating economic damage and more frequent regional crop failures," says Hermann Lotze-Campen from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Europe hit harder than average

"The risk thresholds," summarizes one of the two main authors of the new IPCC report, Hans-Otto Pörtner from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, "are already reached at significantly lower temperature values".

Above all, Pörtner complains about the still large gap between the findings on climate change risks, which have also accelerated further in the past eight years, and the implementation in climate policy and precautionary action.

Particular emphasis is placed on the close link between climate change and the risks to the ecosystems on which a large part of the world's population depends.

It must be ensured as quickly as possible that between 30 and 50 percent of the earth's surface is protected from further exploitation - or at least managed in an ecologically sustainable manner.

Palaeobiologist Daniela Schmidt from the University of Bristol, who is also a co-author of the report like several other German scientists, emphasizes that according to the IPCC analyses, “Europe would be more severely affected by climate change if the temperature rise were not slowed down quickly and consistently.

Four “key risks” have been identified for Europe: heat waves that would double to triple the risk of severe damage to health and deaths at three degrees warming, around the current trend.

In addition, the heat stress for the food crops, as well as water scarcity and flood risks, which alone would lead to a tenfold increase in coastal damage by the year 2100 if the current warming continues.

The report deals more extensively than usual with the adaptation measures, which the IPCC is convinced are still insufficient, and thus possible solutions to the climate crisis.

Here, too, the IPCC proceeds regionally and systematically by comparing the respective situation with the possible scenarios of climate change.